Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: "Florian v. Savigny" <lorian@××××××××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:34:40
Message-Id: 0ML21M-1LdMWh49My-00067l@mrelayeu.kundenserver.de
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding by "Sebastian Günther"
1 Dear Sebastian,
2
3 thank you for your thoughts. I am afraid switching to UTF-8 for
4 everything, although I see that this is the sound thing to do
5 eventually, is not currently an option for me - there are far too many
6 things which depend on that. (Also, it would tend to obscure or
7 complicate the problem rather than fix it, since Emacs obviously gets
8 confused by the console behaviour).
9
10 > there still is /etc/conf.d/consolefont that could mess up things
11
12 The only variable that's set there is CONSOLEFONT="cp1250". I would
13 not understand how the font could have an influence on the characters
14 *produced* by the console, and it seems also difficult to explain why
15 the shell and Emacs, which of course use the same console font, behave
16 differently. (Under the shell, it looks fine while you type it,
17 i.e. you cannot tell that your u umlaut actually consists of two
18 bytes. But Emacs displays the lower-case umlauts followed by a space
19 (i.e. two characters, but not those that most of us are probably quite
20 familiar with, i.e. which you see when UTF-8 is displayed as if it
21 were ASCII), while for upper-case umlauts and the eszett complains
22 that e.g. "\204 is undefined".)
23
24 It definitely looks to me as if the core of the problem is what the
25 console produces, not what it shows, i.e. what a keypress
26 produces. The variable CONSOLETRANSLATION is commented out, meaning I
27 am using the "default one", whichever that is.
28
29 As to the locale, where can I look that up ... ? I seem to remember I
30 purposely use no locale (or "C", I think), but I don't remember where
31 I set that.
32
33 CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT is indeed different for the two kernels, but not in
34 a way that seems to explain anything, as those two encodings differ
35 only on a few positions (not umlauts or eszett):
36
37 linux-2.6.17-gentoo-r7: "iso8859-15"
38 linux-2.6.27-gentoo-r8: "iso8859-1"
39
40 Also, I think what I said last time holds: that only applies to
41 filenames in the filesystem, doesn't it?
42
43 I'll follow your suggestion and re-post the problem on gentoo-user-de,
44 although I think running into that sort of problem might happen to
45 anybody who uses a European language other than English (one of those
46 covered by iso-8859-1, more precisely), so comments here are still
47 welcome! But who still sometimes uses the console, except me?
48
49 I think I'll also write a small script that compares the settings in
50 the two kernel .configs systematically. Could also be of use for later
51 kernel updates ...
52
53 Thanks very much!
54
55 Florian

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding Eray Aslan <eray.aslan@×××××××.tr>
Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding "Sebastian Günther" <samson@××××××××××××××××.de>